Ubuntu Mobile Edition Announced

Great news everyone, soon you will be able to take Ubuntu out and about with you and surf the web wherever you go… I suppose technically you already can if you have a laptop but that’s just nit picking so leave it… alright 😉

The good folks over at Canonical (the company who sponsor Ubuntu) have just announced they are working on a new Ubuntu Mobile Edition. It should be something to rival the Windows Mobile OS and I can’t wait to see how it turns out. The news was announced by Matt Zimmerman yesterday on the Ubuntu development mailing list and it looks really exciting. It even has support from the behemoth CPU maker Intel. Who according to the announcement will be helping out with the project:

From the announcement - "Intel are making significant contributions of technology, people and expertise to the project."

Intel have also announced that they will be developing a new low-power processor and chipset architecture, designed specifically to allow full Internet use on mobile devices. They traditionally have a strong relationship with Microsoft and no doubt they will also be devoting resources to Windows Mobile development for the hardware. However, the very fact that a massive hardware company like Intel is prepared to work with Ubuntu is a real sign of the shifting tide in the software world I think. This comes hot on the heels remember of the Dell partnership announced earlier in the week. Open source software is finally coming of age.

Work on the new mobile OS is yet to start but the target is to release the first version of Ubuntu ME with the next major OS release Ubuntu 7.10 in October this year. Exciting times are afoot for all of us I hope. Personally I can’t wait to fire up Gnome on my mobile PC and have a play… ahem… sorry I mean do some work obviously 😀